In previous work, I’ve discovered that social media use is related to a host of academic and psychosocial outcomes. Most notably, there is a relationship between Facebook use and academic performance and Facebook use and student engagement. When looking at time spent on the site, there is a negative relationship between Facebook use and outcome variables; however, when we parse out different ways of using Facebook, then the relationships become more complex. For instance, what students do on Facebook is more positively predictive of academic and engagement outcomes. My previous research has suggested that using Facebook in certain ways might be driving the negative relationship seen between time spent on Facebook and academic performance. Most notably, using Facebook during class or while studying seemed to explain these negative relationships.

In the current study, I surveyed over 1,600 college students and examined the time they spent on Facebook by splitting that time into two categories: 1) Time spent multitasking (i.e., task switching) with Facebook while studying and 2) “Regular” time spent on Facebook. Based on previous research, my hypothesis was that multitasking would drive the negative relationships seen between Facebook use and grades but that “regular” Facebook use would not. I also examined students at different class ranks (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors) to see if there were any differences that might be attributed to academic maturation.

Here are a few highlights of my findings:

Seniors spent less time on Facebook than students at other class ranks

Seniors also spent less time multitasking with Facebook than students at other class ranks

Regular time spent on Facebook (not multitasking) was negatively related to actual GPA for freshmen but not for students at other class ranks

Time spent on Facebook multitasking was negatively related to actual GPA for students at all class ranks except for seniors

What does it all mean?

Freshmen need to feel socially integrated into their college or university, for if they don’t, they’re at risk of dropping out. One of the ways that freshmen maintain a connection to previous friends and reach out, engage with, and learn about new friends is through Facebook. Therefore, Facebook plays an important role in helping freshmen adjust to college. However, the ways in which Facebook use are negatively related to grades suggests that freshmen have difficulty regulating their Facebook use in the service of academics. I hypothesize that this isn’t an issue related to Facebook per se, but the relationship between Facebook and grades provides a way of capturing self-regulation skills in freshmen. In other words, the pattern of Facebook use helps us see something about self-regulation we might not otherwise be able to measure. This is also evidenced by how regular use of Facebook for students at other class ranks is not related to academic performance.

Another interesting finding was that seniors did not exhibit a negative relationship between multitasking with Facebook and grades. While this is unexpected given the cognitive science literature on task switching, there have been other studies (including some of my own) that have found that use of certain technologies and use of them in specific ways while engaged in learning tasks do not impact outcomes. This area is ripe for further research and I expect to see more in the coming years elucidating what characteristics of social technologies and of their uses mitigates task-switching detriments in cognitive outcomes.

I’m looking for Ph.D. students who want to come work with me at Iowa State. If you are interested in social technologies and how they impact youth, please apply! This would be a funded position and you would work in my emerging research group that will be composed of Ph.D. and Masters students (and eventually advanced undergraduate students). I’m looking for students who are passionate about this research area. The ideal student will be creative in thinking about new research studies they could (eventually) run themselves and/or in thinking about how my existing data can be analyzed. Bonus points for coding and/or statistics skills.

I’ve got a number of projects going right now:

1. Apps and Educational Success. This is a grant-funded project being conducted in collaboration with my colleagues at University of Michigan. We are evaluating a number of apps designed to help middle and high schoolers get to college as well as apps developed to support students already in college.

2. Big Data/Predictive Analytics. This is a large-scale project where over 400 students allowed me to monitor everything they did on their computers for a month. I also have personality data on the students, survey data, as well as institutional data. One of the goals is to discover predictive models that can help identify students at risk by only using trace data.

3. A project on online safety that’s currently in the works.

4. A project on digital technologies to improve self-regulation skills that’s also currently in the works.

Friends and colleagues – Our research team (headed up by me and Nicole Ellison) is engaged in a cool Gates Foundation-funded project to help support college readiness for students who otherwise wouldn’t go to college. This same Gates program funded the development of 19 apps/services/websites to more efficiently help students navigate the college application and transition process (as well as succeed in college when they are there).

We need your help

We are looking for a middle school that would be interested in collaborating on one of our projects. We will be testing a game app to see how well it helps middle schoolers learn about the college-going process. Students would use the app for about 6 weeks and we’d evaluate their college-going knowledge before and after the app intervention. This is a great way to supplement existing middle school programs, plus you’d be helping us learn more about what works with educational apps.

If you are an administrator at a middle school and are interested, please email me directly by clicking here. If you know of someone who might be interested, please forward this along to her or him.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position as an associate professor in the School of Education at Iowa State University starting this summer. I’ll be teaching and advising students in the Student Affairs graduate program.

Many of you who follow this blog know that I started a new position in the Purdue University Libraries this past year. I have enjoyed my time at Purdue– the Libraries faculty are a dynamic and interesting bunch. My explorations of information literacy from an information science perspective will forever influence my research. Not to mention that Purdue is a great institution (and a really cool college town).

I have often heard from student affairs professionals who want to begin a Ph.D. to focus on social media/emerging technologies but have hesitated because no programs focus on such issues. Now is your chance to come work with me! Not only will I be continuing my research on how new technologies influence student development, but I’m joining an already impressive and vibrant community of scholars at Iowa State. We’ve also got two new assistant professors joining us in the fall whose research focuses greatly on social justice issues.

Today at the EDUCAUSE 2013 conference in Anaheim, I unveiled new research on textbook analytics. Textbook analytics are an emerging subcategory of learning analytics, which is the use of student-generated data to predict learning. These predictive analytics promise the ability to identify at-risk students and to help faculty adjust their teaching in real-time.

However, up to now, learning analytics projects have collected limited data. Typical learning analytics systems are tied to Learning and Course Management Systems (LCMSs) and collect data like number of logins, number of discussion posts, etc. Additionally, research showing the predictive ability of learning analytics is limited because these studies relate grade-earning activity with course grades. In other words, students earn grades for discussion posts on LCMSs, so of course number of posts would be related to student course grades.

Textbook analytics provide information on how much students are reading and how they are engaging with their digital textbooks. CourseSmart has developed a textbook analytics platform that unobtrusively calculates an Engagement Index based on how students are interacting with their textbook.

CourseSmart provided data on 233 students including their Engagement Index scores, their background characteristics, and their final course grades. Using a blocked linear regression controlling for gender, race/ethnicity, and prior academic achievement (student transfer GPA), I found that the Engagement Index was significantly predictive of final course grades. In fact, the Engagement Index was a stronger predictor of final course grades than prior academic achievement (see figure below), which has been shown in previous research to be the strongest single predictor of student success.

What was especially interesting was that highlighting was related to student course outcomes, although not in the way that you might think. Those students who were in the top 10th percentile of number of highlights had significantly lower course grades than students in the lower 90th percentile. This is congruent with previous survey research showing that low-skill readers highlight more text and more often than high-skill readers. These results show that perhaps these types of analytics can identify students who need help with their reading skills.

Textbook analytics open up possibilities for real-time and unobtrusive formative assessment for faculty. With a single index, instructors can gauge how much and how well students are engaging with their textbooks, identifying at-risk students before they ever turn in a gradable assignment or interact on the LCMS. Plus, textbook analytics open up possibilities for new methods to research student reading and its relationship to student outcomes.

Student affairs professionals: I need your help for my next book, Engaging Students through Social Media: An Evidence-Based Approach for Student Affairs being published by Wiley/Jossey-Bass.

I’m looking for examples of how you are using social media in your functional areas. Successes and challenges are both welcome! Feel free to post your story in the comments section or send it privately to me via email by clicking here. Please indicate whether you would like to be identified or whether you would like for your contribution to remain anonymous.

Here are some questions to help frame what I’m looking for (note that I’m not looking for you to answer every question – they are just food for thought):

What did you do? Which social media tool did you use? How did you use it? How did you get students to use it with you? How did you overcome departmental/division/institutional resistance, if any?

What worked? How did students respond to the intervention? What did you do (if anything) to measure what worked?

What didn’t work? What were the challenges you faced? Were there challenges you didn’t expect?

What were the major takeaways?

What advice would you give to others?

If I use your example and you choose to be identified, you’ll get credit in the chapter where the example appears and I’ll also list you in the acknowledgements.

I am very happy to announce that I’ll be returning to the Berkman Center for Internetand Society this next academic year as a fellow. I am both honored and incredibly excited for this opportunity to continue to engage and collaborate with the Berkman community, especially the Youth and Media team. I had such a blast this last year collaborating with Youth and Media on projects focusing on youth privacy, memes, and evaluating youth technology use in developing nations. I also examined and/or had engaging discussions about the right to be forgotten with Meg Ambrose, textbook piracy with Bodó Balázs, engaging students in novel ways with Eric Gordon, open access with Peter Suber, the future of education with Justin Reich, hacker culture with Molly Sauter, information quality with Alison Head, privacy tools with Ryan Budish, and had a really fun time leading members of the Berkman community in statistics and methodology sessions. And that list doesn’t even cover the many fascinating lunchtime talks, fellows hours, and digital identity working group sessions.

This coming year, I’ll be finishing my book Engaging Students through Social Media: An Evidence-Based Approach for Student Affairs being published by Wiley/Jossey-Bass. I’ll also be engaged in a number of fun analytics projects. I’m currently working on a paper analyzing how textbook analytics can help predict student success. I’ll also be using a dataset containing comprehensive data on student technology use in order to build predictive models of student success and academic resource utilization– it’s an extension of current learning analytics models to include more predictors and therefore to improve predictive ability of these models. Put another way, I’ll be using big data to improve learning analytics.

I am delighted to announce that later this semester, I will be joining the faculty of the Purdue University Libraries as an associate professor. At Purdue, I will focus on emerging technologies in education with a special focus on the first year experience. If you don’t already know about the great work happening in educational technologies at Purdue, I’d recommend checking out their ITaP studio where they’ve developed learning tools that include: an app that integrates with Facebook to increase student engagement, a learning analytics platform, and a badging system. I’ll also continue my current line of research and look forward to the expansive new lines of inquiry I’ll pursue in collaboration with my new Purdue colleagues.